The News Literacy Project (NLP) is an innovative national educational program that mobilizes seasoned journalists to help middle school and high school students sort fact from fiction in the digital age.

The News Literacy Project (NLP) is an innovative national educational program that mobilizes seasoned journalists to help middle school and high school students sort fact from fiction in the digital age.

A famous saying is, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” The opposite of truth is the lie, and the lie creates bondage and death. The lie is so dangerous because it is presented as truth by impressive and convincing people.

The real truth is often initially painful but is always liberating. Truth is the light at the end of the tunnel.

"The ability to think critically is one skill separating innovators from followers. Critical thinking reduces the power of advertisers, the unscrupulous and the pretentious, and can neutralize the sway of an unsupported argument. This is a skill most students enjoy learning because they see immediately that it gives them more control."

Join me Thursday, December 1st, for another live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar as Tasha Bergson-Michelson brings Debbie Abilock and Jole Seroff together for a panel and audience conversation on "search literacy" in education: what is search literacy, what sources should students be using, how do we help them evaluate what they find, what are the biggest misconceptions about search, and what is the school's role in teaching search literacy and skills?

we seem to be in this bizarre race to the intellectual bottom to write the most generic article in the world so that everyone with an Internet connection will click through. And the only purpose seems to be to keep the advertising monster fed, fat, and happy.

I’m worried that all the noise makes it increasingly difficult for quality content[1] to be seen. Worse, I’m worried that it’s discouraging the creation of quality content because what’s successful (i.e. what gets the most clicks) is mostly lowest-common-denominator blog post titles that either start with a number or end with a question mark.

The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.

"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you're smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing (and to do it without selling your soul in the process). "

Similarly useful questions include: Who besides you shares this opinion? What are your biggest concerns, and what will you do to address them? What would need to change for you to have a different (opposite) opinion?

The fourth tool of BS detection (derived from the rule of expecting BS) is careful assignment of your trust. Never agree to more than your trust allows. Who cares how confident they are: the question is how confident are you in them? It’s rare that there isn’t
time for trust to be earned. Divide requests, projects or commitments into pieces. It’s not offensive to refuse to take someone’s word if they have no history of living up to it before (especially if they’re trying to sell you something).

But lies, serious lies, should not be encouraged as they destroy trust, the binding force in all relationships. One particularly troublesome kind of lie is known as Bullshit (BS). These are unnecessary deceptions, committed in the gray area between polite white lies and complete malicious fabrications.

Currently, Weber is focusing the majority of her time on two very different, but crucial issues: “… environmental decisions, in particular responses to climate change and climate variability, and financial decisions, for example pension savings.”

Her areas of expertise include cognitive and affective processes in judgment and choice, cross-cultural issues in management, environmental decision making and policy, medical decision making, and risk management.

"Working at the intersection of psychology and economics, Weber is an expert on behavioral models of judgment and decision making under risk and uncertainty. Recently, she has been investigating psychologically appropriate ways to measure and model individual and cultural differences in risk taking, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental issues. She describes her research as follows:

"I try to gain an understanding and appreciation of decision making at a broad range of levels of analysis, which is not easy, given that each level requires different theories, methods and tools. So at the micro end of the continuum, I study how basic psychological processes like attention, emotion and memory (and their representation in the brain) influence preference and choice. At the macro end of the continuum, I think about how policy makers may want to present policy initiatives to the public to make them maximally effective. This range of topics and methods is challenging, but at least in my mind the different levels of analysis inform and complement each other." "

Barbano (1968: 65) notices that one of
Merton’s constant preoccupations is with language and the definition of
concepts and recognizes that the function of the latter is for him anything but
ornamental.

It was in the 1930s that
Merton first came upon the concept-and-term of serendipity in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here, he
discovered that the word had been coined by Walpole, and was based on the title
of the fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which
“were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were
not in quest of.”

As
Rob Norton (2002) recognizes: “The first and most complete analysis of the
concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist
Robert K. Merton.” In this way, the combined etymological and sociological
quest began that resulted in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.

Merton provides interesting statistics
to illustrate how quickly the word had spread since 1958. By that time,
serendipity had been used in print only 135 times. But between 1958 and 2000,
serendipity had appeared in the titles of 57 books. Furthermore, the word was
used in newspapers 13,000 times during the 1990s and in 636,000 documents on
the World Wide Web in 2001.

As Mario Bunge (1998: 232)
remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real
founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession;
his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”

To avoid both the ambiguities of the meaning and the disappearance of one of
the meanings, Piotr Zielonka and I (2003) decided to translate serendipity into
Polish by using two different neologisms: “serendypizm” and “serendypicja” – to refer to the event and the personal
attribute respectively.

It is
true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not
laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said
that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of
science.

Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the
elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of
scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the
results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)

Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin,
Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity
has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)

This descriptive model has many important
implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration
and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between
investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific
discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the
historian of science, but it raises further problems for research
administrators.

Whitney
supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking:
“Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt,
without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot
plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:

If scientists are determined
by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find
certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own
observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is
that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we
already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our
conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.

Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton's work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton's main intellectual activity.

“The dot com boom failed because people didn’t want to buy shit online. They were just talking to each other,” said Douglas Rushkoff in a recent keynote speech at the WebVisions conference in Portland. “Content was never king. Contact was always king.”

We understand that the job of the person working in the Gap is to sell us clothes.

“Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers.”

But we don’t apply this same very basic logic to online spaces. The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers.

We are more likely to use our Facebook profile as a mirror, chalking up its deficiencies to the technology itself. We don’t consider that the ways in which Facebook screws with the way we see ourselves is its function, rather than some random artifact of social networking.

But imagine what it would be like if you didn’t know that the evening news was funded primarily by Big Pharma. You would actually believe the stuff that they’re saying. You might even think those are the stories that matter.

In answer to your question, engaging with people costs us privacy. It always has. I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.

Unwittingly, well, it’s more like when your friends keep inviting you to FarmVille or LinkedIn. When they unwittingly turn over their address book to one of these companies that’s really just in the business of swelling their subscriptions so that they can go have an IPO.

If they don’t know how to make the programs, then I’d at least want them to know what the programs they are using are for. It makes it so much more purposeful. You get much more predictable results using the right technologies for the right jobs.

You note how our traditional social contracts (e.g. I can steal anything I want, but I won’t do it out of shame, fear, etc.) break down due to the anonymity and distance of the web. How can we change this and still maintain an open online culture?

rather than getting people to use the web responsibly and intelligently, it may be easier to build networks that treat the humans more responsibly and intelligently. Those of us who do build stuff, those of us who are responsible for how these technologies are deployed, we have the opportunity and obligation to build technologies that are intrinsically liberating — programs that reveal their intentions, and that submit to the intentions of their users.

Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices."

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do-in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.

Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored.

The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it's not anger that's driving the increase in disagreement, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it's easy to say things you'd never say face to face.

a British industry magnate by the name of Henry Kremer wondered: Could an airplane fly powered only by the pilot's body?

Like Da Vinci, Kremer believed it was possible and decided to try to turn his dream into reality. He offered the staggering sum of £50,000 for the first person to build a human-powered plane that could fly a figure eight around two markers set a half-mile apart.

MacCready’s insight was that everyone who was working on solving human-powered flight would spend upwards of a year building an airplane on conjecture and theory without a base of knowledge based on empirical tests. Triumphantly, they would complete their plane and wheel it out for a test flight. Minutes later, a year's worth of work would smash into the ground.

So what's the lesson? When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

"Wanna Solve Impossible Problems? Find Ways to Fail Quicker A case study in how an intractable problem -- creating a human-powered airplane -- was solved by reframing the problem. "

So what's the lesson? When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data), but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you.

The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don't care about.

it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published.

"Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying "Trust this because you trust me." This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics. "

I think there are ways in which we're constantly communicating and yet not making enough good connections, in a way that's to our detriment, to the detriment of our families and to our business organizations

Her new book, Alone Together, completes a trilogy of investigations into the ways humans interact with technology. It can be, at times, a grim read. Fast Company spoke recently with Turkle about connecting, solitude, and how that compulsion to always have your BlackBerry on might actually be hurting your company's bottom line.

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by
the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in
storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found
(when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only
one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path
will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome.

trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully
permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of
trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in
nature.

memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.